Tech job Market-Navigating the New Job Market Landscape

Ginger Baxter is Assistant Dean at the Arduous College of Business and Economics it's a mouthful to say she's in charge of career development and student success . And Tom Piotta , who was dean of the Fowler School of Engineering at Chapman University . Tom Ginger , welcome , let's kick it off , shall we ?

However , I think we have to layer in some of these micro-credentials and some of these universally accepted principles , maybe like project management , because project management is one of the top 10 most searched skills on LinkedIn .

So , as we understand what the marketplace and how it's changed right , because technology is being used to connect the partnerships , right , the student who has the skills coming out of college , with the demand that the employer has , we're going to have to always stay on top of our game and say what do our employers want and what do our students have ?

Where are the gaps ? How can we fill it in ? So I think it's just this beautiful blend of putting it all together .

So I think , for some of these jobs now , I think that face they face that . So I think what we try to focus on is how do they build their resume while they're at college ?

Also , right , there's a lot of things you can do to build your resume while you're at college , and it could be through internships Internships are tough to get sometimes , but it could be just things that you're doing in college also , whether you're doing research with a professor or you're involved in a professional society and showing that as part of that , and I

think that starts to distinguish them a little bit more and show some experience .

stamping , that you know something about a particular topic , right .

Employers used to have these management development programs and management trainee programs and now they expect most of their folks to come in fully baked , all the way , trained right . So what you're seeing is the employers are creating job simulations so you may learn something in the classroom .

Then the employer and this is on a platform right now it's called Forage they're going to go in and the employer and it's big brands . Guys , am I allowed to talk about brands ?

They're going to get the academic component how it linked to their education , and then the employer component , how the employer is using that skill . They then earn a badge that they can document and they can reference on their CVs and on their resumes , as well as on their social media .

So it's really a cool new way of helping students what we campus to career right Connecting what you're doing in the classroom directly to what you're doing on the job and in business .

I mean , if that's what the I mean really , if it's all about getting a job , why is it that we teach them other stuff , you stuff and obviously I'm being a little sarcastic here because there's as a highly degreed person myself , I'm hoping that some of the stuff I've learned in my life is of value but why is it that we don't teach just that kind of

vocational training stuff ?

So really they want something on top of that right , and even our accreditors actually ask for this now . So how do you make them ? How are , how do students grow and become well-rounded while they're at college ? Also ? That's , that's part of it , you know , because , yeah , they could .

They could sit at home and take online courses on machine learning and AI and other things . But then the question is , yes , they have the skills , but are they ready for their workforce ? Then ? And they go , are they ?

Are they ready to go work in teams , work on projects where they need to understand systems and team dynamics and leadership and communications and those things ? And I think that's what they get when you go to college .

You know we try to create those and simulate those experiences for students where they're testing out those skills and working on projects that you know we hope are real life . They're never really going to be real life and sometimes , you know , we make them up on our own , but you know , we can simulate that for them .

And then when they go to talk on an interview , more than likely they're going to be asked about a project that they worked on and our students will talk about the grand challenge project that they worked on .

Your apprenticeship was going back to the days of the guilds . So what I'm concerned with is is it getting harder to get an internship ? And if that's the case , why ? Because I hear it from my own daughter . So what are you seeing on the ground ?

They want to make it good for both sides . Gone are the days of the intern going and grabbing coffee and bringing it back . They want to have real , meaningful , impactful opportunities . I also think you're going to see with the internships that students are also being choosy on their end right . So there's a selectivity going in both ways .

Before we would say start with a part-time job . I think when we talk internships versus part-time jobs , that's a really cool conversation because it goes back to high school . So it's not necessarily happening here in college , but it's back in high school .

Most of your high school students who are looking for and attending for your universities many of them , not all of them , but what they did in high school was they took a lot of AP classes , so they replaced those part-time jobs with more deep knowledge at the high school level and so they didn't have as many early experiences .

So one of the professors I was working with at another university . He said Ginger , your role is not to help train these students for a job . Your role is to give them more experiences so they can learn how to become professional .

And that's a distinction that has made a big impact on how we approach things , because professionalism has a component of generational right . The people that are hiring over , possibly maybe of a different generation , have a different expectation of what it is to be a professional .

So the more experiences we give them whether they're internships or they're experiential learning and baked into the classroom the more connectivity that we can have , the more guidance and mentorship is going to make a huge impact on how they see their whole career unfolding .

I want to talk about one little thing that you said that reminds me that I talk about with a lot of folks and I think we do a beautiful job , marshall , because I do get to work with you of training our students on the language of business . They can calculate the ROI right , they can do a discounted cash flow .

These are business students , but we have to work really hard on teaching them the language of work , and that's a very nuanced and different way of thinking of it .

You know , particularly these kids coming out of the COVID experience you know is saturated with the social media stuff . Is there any way you can address that issue ? Because we hear over and over again from employers I don't want to hire these people because you know they think they just hired and now they have a six-week vacation or something .

So to do that , put them into situations where they're working together in teams , they're developing leadership skills , they're having to communicate and develop kind of those they like to call them softer skills . Whether they're soft or hard , I think that's that's , you know , for people to decide .

But if you do that right away , then it becomes part of , like what they're doing in their education and they're going to experience that and and employers are going to see that as kind of the added piece of what they do also . So like , for instance , we had I mentioned the grand challenges initiative for our freshman and sophomore students .

Give , but they narrow it down to something very specific that they can work on Give . An example of the team that won this year . We like to partner with industry on this too , because industry always has needs to address these challenges .

So one of the LayerJot was one of our industry partners and they do a lot in the healthcare space with just being healthy or being clean , and they wanted to use AI for hand compliance on washing your hands . So the students project really was to use ai to detect whether people were washing their hands properly in a health care environment , you know .

And they won the team . And what a great experience , because the students had to develop that these are freshmen and sophomore students wow and they developed like a way of monitoring . They were testing out , doing like early stage kind of testing of it Right , and working with that industry partner too . So it's a great experience they get .

Yeah , they didn't necessarily have all those technical skills , but that's okay .

They , they ask , they find out kind of where to get that , whether they ask experts or look it up , but then they get to do it in a team environment also and I think that's very cool and I guarantee you every student in that group when they go to an employer interview now they're going to ask them something Along the way .

But you know , both of you in this conversation have have focused on this notion of being a professional and developing yourself as an engineer or as a business person , but with the notion that there's a set of professionalism skills that go along with it that mature over time , is that their desire to invest in people over time used to be very high , and now

particularly big companies Right , and now is much , much shorter Right that the their view of the utility of a human being in their organization is , like you know , it's faster than a fly's life cycle . Like you know , it's faster than a fly's life cycle .

So is there a disconnect here in terms of what the employers are saying they would like to have , what we're saying we'd like to develop you as , and the environment in the workplace ?

I mean , you all talk to companies that are here in Orange County , in Southern California . It's not necessarily because it's cheap , right , definitely not because it's cheap . But part of it is because they know to attract talent , people like living in this environment . There's something about the social environment here , the climate and other things .

So , yes , some companies kind of get that . I realize all companies don't necessarily get that . I think I was sharing with , I was sharing with Marshall and you all earlier . You know I won't name the company , but I was told by by , by the executive , their work with companies .

You know some of these bigger companies will hire 2000 people , knowing that to to do , to work , knowing that they really only need 200 , but they don't know which 200 that they need . So that tells me they probably don't care as much about the employees but they're really just trying to get people in there .

Now I think your point is well made and your point is well made that the employers because early career professionals , right , those that are coming straight out of college , right we think they know what they want to do and that they're going to go down this linear path and that they're going to end up in the C-suite , right , but really they take that first job

. Does it fit ? Does it not fit , they leave two to three years out . That's what's making it difficult to do the deep investments , because of the turnover , of the turnover , and the turnover is part of this self-discovery that we see the students going through , where they find where they really do fit and where they excel and they thrive .

So I do think that's some of it . You are correct , there's not as many employers that are diving as deep . One place that you can actually look at it is in like tuition reimbursements and tuition remission . How many employers are still covering the cost of either a four-year degree or a graduate degree ?

And I think that that's another metric that you can see it's going down .

You had all these big companies that were still here in Southern California and they were paying for a lot of this , and I don't think that environment is there . I also think big companies seem to be moving to particularly different regions .

I don't know if you talk to your colleague , let's say , in a place like Dallas where there's been a huge boom in jobs , did they tell you anything ? Different People from growing Sunbelt cities ?

There's a lot of startup community , but I think when you have these employers that are relocating to find new talent or to save on the cost of the building that they're having to be in or they're redesigning what work looks like they're having to be in or they're redesigning what what work looks like , maybe some folks are working from home and some folks are

coming to the office . I think that that's part of it . I do think the development is also maybe looking sometimes to online learning at . You know part of what's going on , and I also say some people are taking ownership of their lifelong learning , right .

So college is still so relevant because the young adult is able to make mistakes in a safe environment and learn from those mistakes . It's much harder to make mistakes after you're out of school , right ?

Micro-internships are like not as much of an investment basically from from a company , but they need and they want to get some of that working with young talent , um , on very specific projects , project based , yeah , yeah , and companies actually organize and and make these micro internships and available to students and advertise them for companies .

So it's not like as a company you have to do it on growing work with a third party .

experience I've had since Bailey Chapman , not because Marshall just- . Oh no , that's the only reason . No , the students were spectacularly engaged in the topic .

Well , how do you , as an educational institution , deal with that reality ? Certainly , one of the things that we hear is that AI is going to reduce the need for certain kinds of technical skills that are the ones that usually young people are used for . How do you train or prepare students in an AI environment for what's coming ?

So when we started looking and diving deep into some data , in the last two years in the four-county area right here , the entry-level marketing jobs have declined 60% . Okay , so that's because the AI is taking on some of the functionality . So what do we have to do to help our students still get those other jobs ?

And then you have to remember , in this local market that we are , there are other colleges you've already named one of them that also are producing talent . So what can we do to give our students that edge ? Right , the ones ? There's still going to be some jobs , they're still going to be out there , but why are you the one that we should select ?

And so that's part of that .

So I do think that's showing up as skills that they want to see and that can be whether they took a course or they did a project you know with , like the one I described earlier , you know . So I think they want to see part of that in skills .

I think the other thing with AI that I think is really interesting and I think universities and education needs to lean into this actually is it's really compressed down , the need to whether it's number crunch or spend a lot of time writing or those other things , but what it's put the emphasis on is the front end and the back end .

So AI is only going to be good if you're formulating , you're giving it a good prompt , right ? So and that's really what education is supposed to be doing is getting students to think about , like , what questions are you supposed to be asking ?

Right , you know , because that middle part there , you know whether it's programming or calculations or kind of the writing piece of it . Yeah , it's going to be crunched down because of AI and it does that , but we don't . And then on the back end someone's going to need to be able to say whether OK , does that make sense or does it need to be refined ?

Part of that is the engineering side of how does that actually get constructed ? How do you do it iteratively ? Because most people in AI are finding these days that you just don't ask one question .

You ask the first question and then you kind of refine the prompt down , refined the prompt down , but part of it is engineering and part of it is kind of the overall sense of what context am I giving to the AI in order for it to answer .

So it's not strictly a business thing , it's not strictly an engineering thing and it has actually overtones of classical philosophy that are associated with what's reality . How do we deal with this question of integrativeness , of learning ?

People , right , they want to dive deep and they want their heads down in the data , heads down into the engineering and the science , and it was the business people that were the salespeople , they were the presenters and what you really have to do is , if you've got a heads down person , you need to help them become a heads up person .

If you got a heads up person , you need to help them dive down a little deeper . So you're seeing it come closer and closer to the middle , so that they are collaborative .

And I think all of the integrated partnerships and the more that we do projects , the engineering students and the business students together , where they all learn to be a little more digital savvy and , at the same time , maybe a little more presentation savvy , right , that the visual image may really matter . It's going to make a huge impact .

So I do think it's liberal arts . There's a wonderful place in this world for liberal arts . I also think you're going to see these things in career progression .

It may not be in the first three years out of school , but it's going to be in the next 10 and 20 years , those that have learned to think critically and learn to ask the right questions and learn to be adaptable , which was the number one skill for the last three years . We've needed adaptability .

That's what's going to define the career progression , and they're going to have multiple careers , right ? So what do you think , dean ? No , I agree a lot .

I mean , when we think about this question , whether it's you know , whether we need generalists or specialists , the answer is yes , right , literacy really is kind of what everyone needs to be , regardless of what your major is now , because you really can't operate in a world without digital literacy .

So defining that is really kind of important , and even just like asking basic things like how do you interact with AI , that's part of that's being digital literate , right In different contexts . Right In different contexts .

I think the other thing I find with at least our engineering and science students , you know , since , since it has technology has impacted all sectors . Now you think about the health sector , for instance . It's so impacted by by technology . Now , it increases the need and also the opportunity for students to work in so many broad areas , right ?

So you need , in some ways , you need to be a specialist if you're computer science or engineering , but you also have to have some generalists in terms of like , if you need to understand . If you're working for a healthcare industry or a hospital or biotech company , you need to know something about health and medicine , right ?

So , students , it broadens out their opportunities , but they also put the spotlight that they need to understand the broader world .

So , in a world that is becoming , this is truly I don't know the answer to this and I'd love your opinion on it but in a world that seems to be becoming more AI-driven , in the sense that algorithms are going to be prescribing what solutions are right , not just identifying something , but saying , saying , actually taking over , and saying , oh , you're going to do

this as a result of the algorithm saying this is what's happening . Um , what is the role of leadership going to be in the future ? If leadership is supposed to be leading people , are you leading algorithms ? How are we , as educators , kind of thinking about what that future world is going to be like ?

So I think that the human nature of the way we operate as humans is never going to go away . Way we operate as humans is never going to go away , and I think that leads to innovation and and other really great things that make society , you know , work the way it does . So I think that's incumbent .

On going back to your question on on leaders is how do you still put that important , make that important for whatever you're doing , but be assisted by technology in the way it should be , you know ?

But at the end of the day , what do people want ? What do people need ? They want to be happy , they want to have their families , they want to have connectivity , friends , a sense of community . They want to have connectivity friends , a sense of community , and I think there are ways that the AI can help build that for us right and help us .

So when you use the word assistive , I think that's what it really is . It's an assistive technology that's going to help us evolve . Now , I made a joke the other day and I was like I want my assistive technology , my AI , to do my laundry .

So I think that that's where a colleague of mine said he thinks we're going to have a crisis of creativity , that it may be creative problem solving but maybe it's not necessarily in the arts , and that that may be where we see some real differences . Because how is that going to be impacted ?

it's much more complicated than that , and that's my big worry is that everything is going to become sort of a technological solution based on some sort of common standard of mediocrity and yeah , and , and that that really worries the flip side of that , by , by the way , is a comment I heard the other day which stuck with me , which was that the advent of

generative AI means that there's never going to be such a thing as writer's block again , that you'll always be able to have a starting point by starting with the AI .

Right , ai is evolving , which brings me to kind of the question I think we want to wrap up with , which is this notion of preparing people for life . You know , we think about it . There's kind of an inherent baked in myth that you go to college , you get your degree , hopefully you have a little bit of generalism shaken together with your specialization , right ?

So do you have a nice bit of generalism shaken together with your specialization , right ? So do you have a nice little stew of and that and that somehow that's going to prepare you for life . You go into a company . The myth used to be you're going to be in that company for life and they're going to nurture you and you're going to get .

But there's this , this notion of kind of a lifelong continuum . But what we're seeing is just a series of the opposite . We're seeing disruption hits right in almost every industry in the world . Are we preparing people for a world that is characterized by disruption ?

So the leadership crisis challenge is the capstone for the seniors right now , and they come in on a Friday afternoon at five o'clock and they assume C-suite roles within a company , and then a crisis happens . This time it was a cybersecurity issue and the technology wasn't working the way it was supposed to be .

It had been hacked , and so all night they were receiving reports of what was going on , and people were trapped inside their houses and couldn't get out of their houses . They had to do a video , because that should have been ready for the 11 o'clock news , right ? So in real time , this is unfolding . Here's your video Uh-oh .

And the evening something else happens . You wake up in the morning because we're in a 24-7 world . It's no longer what you thought it was when you went to bed , and now there's a lawsuit , right .

So you're this up and down , and that's not disruptive technology , but that's how that's disruptive events , events that's disruptive events , so you're training them to deal with disruption based . Exactly . Then they had to do a press conference , right . They had to go before their board of directors . We had the industry folks come in and be the board of directors .

So I think that's what the world has been moving so fast that this generation has grown up with it and I think that's part of it , right .

But it can also be an opportunity , because what did they do to to persevere and kind of live through that ? Right , they had to adapt , everyone had to adapt , right , you know .

So you can use those what's going on in the world right now , whether it's the pandemic or other things , as as ways to show students that , yes , it's not going to be all pretty when you go out there .

Things are changing pretty rapidly , um , and there's a lot of life events that kind of that you've lived through also , um , so we try to bring that into the curriculum through those experiences , like I talked about earlier , that are real-life ones and kind of put students in kind of the situations where they have to work through those experiences .

I did a VR simulation example with Marshall and I hope to do it in my class . The Mars simulation where they're putting in a crisis simulation example with Marshall .

You know and I hope to do it in my class you know the Mars simulation where they're putting in a crisis and how do you deal as a where you have to offload kind of a bunch of stuff from your on payload and how do you make those decisions as a team ?

Love the Mars one with the VR stuff it makes me wonder whether or not we should be rethinking what we have , what we give degrees in , like having a degree , a bachelor's , of science , in adaptability you know something like that . I wonder whether or not there's going to be a wholesale rethink .

I wonder whether there's not a new set of professions that are emerging . What do you think I mean ?

And in engineering we have a bad accreditation and that becomes part of the accreditation process . They see that as valuable , those softer kind of skills , to be part of your degree um . So I think we want to be careful that I think there's always going to be a need for those core degrees .

I kind of doubt that we're moving away from those , or I could be wrong you know , but I think you know I I would be worried about like getting into like specialized degrees , because what does it look like five years from now ?

It's hard to predict what's going to be four years , five years , 10 years down the road , but what's consistent across everything is they're going to need to be able to communicate .

So the more that we bake in communication skills and they're going to be able to communicate in new and different platforms , new and different channels and new and different ways , teamwork is always going to be very highly skilled and highly valued . But what is a team ? Is a team that we're all sitting around a table and talking , or is a team ?

One person is in a time zone you know 12 hours away and another person ? So I think teamwork is going to be redefined and what the goals are . But that's consistent across generations . You have you have your teams , you have your leadership , you have your communication skills .

Think what you're going to need to add to that recipe is a commitment to incorporate technology and industry into almost every course , right , almost every course , not just business courses .

Even when we talk philosophy , you know that if you can blend industry , what's happening in the real world with technology , with the learning objectives , and build in structured thought processes . I think that's going to be the difference .

The students need that framework , that structure , and I'm going to give you all an example , because I was talking with the director of AI for one of our major players , like Facebook , and he had his son , and he took his son to the store and he's going to buy him a toy , right ? So he said which of these two do you want , a or B ?

And the son said I don't know , let me ask my technology . And so the eight-year-old was going to let the technology tell him which toy he wanted . And so that's our gift to the next generation is making sure that they can still make decisions and not rely on the technology .

We'll know about this because he was a judge for the competition in engineering . We do something called make-a-thon and we want students to kind of make things right , you know , because it's not just about ai , it's also like making cool things , and I love it when students are innovative and those innovations come from their own life experiences also .

So we had a student that was and this was a group of three women One was a student athlete , lacrosse player and the other two were dancers and what they ended up developing was basically like a smart knee brace , right , and it was because of their life experiences .

They all had knee injuries and the idea was that it would tell people when they're doing rehab whether they're being compliant or not , you know , and what a great idea . And Marshall had the great comment that , well , you're going to have a baby boomer audience . That that's a huge audience for it Right .

But I think that type of innovation is really what we want students to be , we want our students to have , because those core , those other core skills whether those core skills end up being AI or other things I think that's going to be an expected piece of it . But what else are they doing to show that makes them stand out ?

And then the last thing I would say in there is and I do think we're trying to do more of this , and I think everyone needs to be more of this , and I think everyone needs to be more of this for we refer we refer to it as a year zero , year zero student .

It's the students that we're trying to recruit there , along with the parents that that are invested in this too , showing to them what does it look like when they graduate and where are they going to work , the potential of how much money they might be making . Also . That needs to be .

We're getting more and more questions from parents and students now when choosing where they're going to go to university . They want to know more what's going to happen at year four also .